Tuesday, 2 May 2017

William Lane Craig on the Absurdity of Life without God

Is
life meaningless without God? That is what the Christian philosopher and
theologian William Lane Craig claims with great confidence in a chapter of his
book Reasonable Faith, published in
1994:[1]
“if there is no God, then man’s life becomes absurd.” (40) The main reason for
this appears to be, at least initially, the fact that we all have to die. If
there is no God, then death is real, both for us and for everything else,
including the universe itself, and “the prospect of death and the threat of
non-being is a terrible horror.” (41)[2]
Without God there is no immortality for us, and without immortality “the life
we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose.” (42)

Life
has no ultimate significance because
all the significance it can ever have is merely relative. What we do is relatively significant if it impacts on
other events. But if the changes we bring about do not change the final destiny
of the universe (because whatever we do, things will cease to exist someday),
then they have no ultimate
significance. Whatever we accomplish in life, it is then “utterly meaningless”:
“This is the horror of modern man: because he ends in nothing, he is nothing.” (42)
Immortality, however, is not enough. Without God, an immortal life would still
be meaningless because we “could still ask of life, ‘So what?’” (43).

In
addition to having no ultimate significance, life has no ultimate value either since we will die (i.e. be
punished by death) no matter what, whether we are good or bad. This means that
good deeds remain unrewarded and bad deeds unpunished (or, if we see death as
punishment, then they are not punished more
than good deeds, which is, presumably, what justice would require). Moreover, there
are no objective standards of right and wrong. Hitler’s values are just as good
as those of a saint. Good and evil do not exist.

Finally,
if God does not exist, our life has no ultimate purpose either. “If there is no God, then our life is not
qualitatively different from that of a dog.” (45) We are just like all the
other animals, freaks of nature, a “blind product of matter plus time plus chance”,
soon to return into nothingness. There is no reason why we are here. Only if
God exists, is there any hope for us. Without him, there is only despair.

For
all those reasons, Craig concludes, atheism is a practical impossibility. We cannot live consistently and happily
without believing in the existence of God. We can perhaps think atheism, but we cannot live
as atheists. In order to do so we need to delude ourselves. We need to live a
lie, pretending that the universe acquires meaning when we give it one and
things matter for some reason or other. That, however, is not the case. “Without
God, there is no objective meaning in life.” (47) And since there is no
absolute (objective) right or wrong, the consistent atheist would have to
acknowledge that “all things are permitted” (49). In fact, however, the vast
majority of atheists do not act as if they really believed that. They act as if
there are things that are not
permitted, which makes no sense if there are no objective values. What they
should do, if they were consistent, is care only for themselves. They should do
whatever it takes to survive, because that is what natural selection “dictates”
(51). If there is no God, but only nature, then the atheist has no reason to be
moral, and every reason to be immoral. For in nature, “whatever is, is right. But
who can live with such a view?” (51) Indeed, why would we want to live with such a view? Clearly, it is better to believe
that there is a God (and not just any God, but “the God of the Bible”), because
if we don’t, our lives are “absurd”, i.e., worthless and pointless. Therefore, “a
rational person ought to choose biblical Christianity” (54).

COMMENTARY:

Craig
insists that life without God is meaningless, but he does not really explain
why we should expect the existence of God to make a difference. Why does the
existence of God rid our life of absurdity? Or is it actually our belief in the existence of God that does
that? “It seems to me positively irrational to prefer death, futility, and
destruction to life, meaningfulness, and happiness. As Pascal said, we have
nothing to lose and infinity to gain.” (54) The reference to Pascal suggests it
is the belief that matters. This would change things. If the existence of God gives our lives
significance, value and purpose, then it doesn’t really seem to matter whether
or not we believe in God. Even if we don’t believe in God, our lives are meaningful.
If, on the other hand, it is our belief
in the existence of God that makes our life meaningful, then it doesn’t seem to
matter whether or not God actually exists. Even if he does not, our lives would
still be meaningful if we believed he did. Craig would probably want to argue
that for our lives to be meaningful it must both
be true that God exist and that we believe
in his existence, but he does not give us a reason why this should be so. (Will
God perhaps punish us if we don’t believe in him, by withholding eternal life
from us?) As it stands, his position is certainly ambiguous.

But
let us assume that it is God’s existence that matters most for the possibility
of living a meaningful life, and ask why we should think that. Only if God
exists, is there any hope, Craig says, but hope for what exactly? It cannot be
immortality as such because Craig has stated clearly (and quite plausibly) that
an immortal life without God would be just as meaningless as a mortal life
without God. So it is not really death that is the problem, and not really
immortality that is the solution. Immortality may still be necessary for a
meaningful life, but it is not sufficient. But if it is not because of the immortality
that God’s existence promises to us that God’s existence can be expected to make
our lives meaningful, what else can it be?

If
there is no God, Craig claims, then there are no objective values, and if there
are no objective values, then “all things are permitted”. So does God’s
existence make our life meaningful because only then what appears good to us
really is good and what appears evil
to us really is evil, so that not
everything is permitted? There are at least two problems with this
interpretation. First of all, it is unclear how exactly God makes values
objective. We may want to say that God has a privileged perspective, so while we may occasionally be unsure about what
is right and wrong, good and evil, he
knows exactly what is good and what is not. However, in that case we seem to be
presupposing that there already is an
objective good and evil (because if there were not, how could God know about it?). Therefore we don’t
really need God for there to be good
and evil. The only thing we might need him for is to tell us what is really
good and evil. But not knowing for sure what is really good and what is really evil
does not seem to make our lives absurd, at least not to the same degree that
the non-existence of good and evil
would, and certainly not in the sense that Craig uses the term. The alternative
is that God literally makes things
good and evil: he decides that, say, looking after a sick friend is good and
torturing a puppy to death is evil, and the one is good and the other bad only because he has made that decision.
Had he made a different decision, then it might not be. Had he decided that
looking after a sick friend is evil and torturing puppies to death is good,
then that would be what is good and evil objectively. This is of course exactly
what Craig believes,[3]
but this view strikes me as a lot more absurd than the view that some things
are really bad and that for this very reason God does not want us to do them. In
any case, either things, or rather actions, are good or bad in themselves
independent of whether we regard them as good or bad, or they are not. If they
are, then God is not needed to make them so. And if they are not, then God
regarding or postulating them as good
does not make them good in themselves. They would still be only subjectively
good, namely for, or from the perspective of, the divine subject.

The
second problem with the argument that without God there are no objective values
and that without objective values “all things are permitted” is that even
though it might be true that from the point of the universe all things are
permitted, meaning that the universe does not care what we do and do not do and
whether we are “good” or “bad”, from our
own point of view there are clearly many things that are not permitted. And
it seems to me that our own perspective is, and should be, more important to us
than the point of view of the universe, even if there is a God and the point of
view of the universe is in fact God’s point of view. Craig is obviously wrong
(and blatantly inconsistent) when he suggests that natural selection “dictates”
that we only care for ourselves. In nature, he claims, “whatever is, is right.”
This is of course not the case. Natural selection does not dictate anything,
and if there are no objective values, then whatever is, is neither right nor
wrong. It simply is. Yet among the things that are, are also our values, our
views on what is right and wrong, what should and what should not be done. The
atheist, therefore, is in no way rationally compelled to be a selfish bastard. Perhaps
in theory nothing is (absolutely) forbidden, but in practice there are certain
things we approve of and others that we disapprove of, certain things that we
forbid ourselves, and each other. And that is all we will ever have. Even if
there is a God who could tell us how things really are (that, for instance,
torturing puppies is actually not so bad at all), we could still think that what
God tells us is good is a heinous thing to do, even if the only basis we have
for our judgement is the fact that we are repulsed by it. Why would it matter so
much to us what God thinks and wants? Because he is more powerful and
(presumably) holds our fate in his hands?

To
sum up: if our lives are meaningless because our values lack objectivity or
absolute validity, then it is not clear how God’s existence would change that. Nor
is it clear why we should, in a naturalistic, godless universe, have to live as
if nothing mattered, given that certain things clearly do matter to us.

The
situation is similar with respect to purpose. We clearly do have purposes, so
in that sense our lives have purpose (though perhaps not a purpose). Are they good for anything else? Perhaps not. But why
do they have to? There is no reason for our existence, Craig says. Maybe not. Probably not. But again, why does there
have to be such a reason? We may be better off without it. Certainly, we may
need a reason to go on living (and fortunately most of us have such reasons
most of the time), but we don’t really need a reason for being there in the
first place. And more importantly, why should our being part of some greater,
divine purpose make our lives more meaningful (in the only sense that matters:
of being more worth living)? It seems to me if there were a God and God had
assigned some role to me, so that my existence had in that sense a purpose (i.e.,
it would help realize God’s purpose),
then I would still have to think about it and then either accept or not accept my
role in the divine plan. If I did not like the role I was supposed to play,
then playing it would not make my life any more meaningful. But if I have to
accept a role in order for it to give my life not just a purpose, but a meaningful
purpose, then why can I not just create a role for myself that I am happy with
and play that role as best I can? Why is God’s purpose better than my purpose?
Why would my existence be more purposeful if it aligned with God’s purpose
rather than my own?

Finally,
it seems strange and rather implausible to say that because we end in nothing, we are nothing. Why should only the eternal, the never-ending, count
as something? This (essentially Platonic) assumption is especially weird since
all the somethings we have ever encountered and are ever likely to encounter
are finite. As far as we know, everything that exists one day started to exist
and will one day cease to exist. This is what being something means: being
something in time and therefore for a time. What is absurd is to expect and
desire more than that.

[2] It is not quite clear to me why the
death of the universe is relevant for Craig. If the prospect of my own personal
death makes life meaningless/ absurd already,
then why does Craig make so much of the ultimate fate of the universe?Also, Craig thinks that death
only becomes horrible when we contemplate our own death. The death of others is
not such a big deal. (41) But it seems to me that often the death of others
(most frequently the death of our loved ones) is more horrible to imagine than
our own death. I can live with the fact that I have to die. That they have to die I find much harder to
accept.

[3] Craig supports the divine command
theory, which holds that certain actions are right simply and solely because
God commands us to act that way, rather than that he commands us to act that
way because it is the right thing to do. Morality thus depends entirely on what
God wants. It follows that without God there is no morality, no objective right
and wrong.